Milestone #4

In search of a place to sew prototypes and the final project, our group decided to that we would attend the orientation of the Makerspace resource that is available in D. H. Hill Library on campus. There we would have access to sewing machines, supplies, and scrap fabric that we were free to use. Also the main worker in the Makerspace on staff who is a graduate student here at NC State named Jessica also offered to help us to determine how to sew our bucket together.

While searching through the scrap fabric in the Makerspace, we found a lot of scrap cotton canvas that was still useable. After some research, we determined that we would rather use nylon canvas than cotton canvas because nylon is more lightweight and less porous. While we could not use the cotton canvas for our final project, we decided that we could make our first prototype out of the cotton canvas to get a feel for the type of structure we should use and then transition to nylon canvas for possibly other prototypes and the final product.

For our first prototype, we decided to go with a cylinder design that looks like the typical bucket. The problems that we ran into were that the amount of fabric we had restricted us to only having a certain size for our prototype and we had to resize it multiple times. We also ran into the problem of sewing the pieces together, and we finally ended up hand sewing it using a running stitch.

After finishing the sewing, we began to coat the seams with gorilla glue. We decided to only do the inside of the seams so they would be more waterproof but not be too rigid. We then moved to coat the prototype with latex to test whether or not it could hold water.